Unashamedly Inegalitarian

Sanford Pinsker finds much to praise in Cynthia Ozick's new collection of essays, The Din In The Head. His words, and her essays, are a clarion call to those who hold that it's always the avant garde -- who may care nothing for audience or reception -- that contributes anything meaningful in the development of the arts:

"...Ozick insists that some works of literature are better — not merely 'different,' but better — than others, and that the unfettered (read: apolitical) literary imagination continues to matter. Many writers rant, but few do it with the aplomb of the curmudgeonly Ozick. She scolds and scours — all in an effort to pull down contemporary vanity and to promote writing genuinely worthy of our attention...Ozick is unapologetic about her elitism, because she was formed by a high modernism that has long ago receded. To come of age at a time when T.S. Eliot was literary culture's dominant taste-setter, when would-be novelists cut their teeth on Henry James and James Joyce, is to look on much that passes as postmodernist culture with great suspicion."